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Ghost Dance at Ryerson Image Centre: outrage for the past; hope for the future

The main gallery of Ghost Dance, the recently opened show of mostly First Nations art at the Ryerson Image Centre, pulses with a thrum of mechanical dread. It’s coming from an installation piece by Theo Sims and Scott Benesiinaabandan that’s sequestered behind a barricade of black tarpaper and razor wire.

It’s the sound of bristling injustice, a tone to which we’ve become accustomed over the years, or decades really, since aboriginal artists embraced the absurd tragedy of their contemporary circumstances as creative fuel. For just as long, it’s been a wellspring of gasoline for most-often fiery expression; a foregrounded rage in works by such artists as Rebecca Belmore and Carl Beam, to pick just a couple, have been a dominant feature of that expression for some time.

Redacted text from declassifed FBI documents regarding the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1970s and its leaders, discovered by Dana Claxton in her research into the movement.

Sonny Assu's The Happiest Future seizes on the writings of former head of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, and recasts them as multicoloured posters with the sense of a marketing pitch.

A still image from Skawennati's digitally animated TimeTraveller series, which he produced using the virtual reality game Second Life. Here, he recreates the famous standoff between a Canadian soldier and a Mohawk warrior during the 1990 Oka crisis.

At the same time, things change. Ghost Dance appears not against the backdrop of past furies like the Oka Crisis of 1990, but the recent Idle No More movement, where incendiary confrontation was replaced with peaceful protest, however steadfast. Curator Steven Loft says at the outset of Ghost Dance that “(f)or me, aboriginal art is innately political.” A new breadth of expression for those politics, it seems, is what Ghost Dance is about.

Nonetheless, Loft starts, literally with a bang. In the first space, a four-channel video by Vernon Ah Kee, an Australian Aboriginal artist, captures the frantic violence of the 2004 Palm Island riot, where a largely Aboriginal community reacted in rage to the death in police custody of one of their own.

A police station and barracks were burned, bringing special forces in riot gear to the island and a simmering frustration among residents to full boil. Ah Kee cuts back and forth between residents demanding justice and panicked cops barricaded in the local hospital; periodically departing the chaos with a test pattern and dull drone, suggesting, maybe, the cold reality of irreconcilable difference.

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Whatever the case, it’s an interesting foil to Round Dance II, the video work in the next room by American Indian artist Alan Michelson. On four TV monitors set vertically throughout the space (one is actually in the lobby), a cheery group — whites and Indians alike — hold hands and dance in a circle, out of one frame and into the next. The piece is the most clear iteration of a clever curatorial conceit, in which works by different artists are intermingled, and recurrent throughout the show in a deliberate-seeming gesture of all-for-one solidarity.

Round Dance II has this inherent to its nature, as its dancers ring the entire gallery, slipping from one screen to the next, but you can think of it as a touchstone to the breadth of policality Loft means to embrace here. One of the dancers pops into frame wearing an Idle No More T-shirt, grinning widely, an embodiment of the optimism that positive gestures can beget positive change. On headphones, a voice intones the absurdly reasonable requests the movement makes: “We are here to remind all Canadians that our history is your history. It doesn’t start with confederation.” Can you seriously have a problem with that?

Drifting through the ether from screen to screen, Michelson’s dancers are a close-to-literal version of the show’s titular ghosts and maybe that’s the point: of haunting the proceedings here with a steadfast spectre of celebratory dignity and hope.

Which isn’t a bad idea, because things get inevitably bleak. Sonny Assu, a Ligwilda’xw of the We Wai Kai First Nation in Northern British Columbia, appropriates the words of Duncan Campbell Scott, a treaty negotiator in 1905 in Northern Ontario and eventually the head of the Department of Indian Affairs in 1913. Once there, Scott crafted legislation aimed at assimilating Indian populations and that would, infamously, eventually result in the establishment of residential schools.

Assu seizes on one of Scott’s first writings after getting the top job at Indian Affairs: “The happiest future for the Indian race is absorption into the general population. That is the policy of our government.” Assu recasts Scott’s words as an array of multicoloured posters aimed clearly at capturing the sense of a marketing pitch, and the dissonance between form and content achieves its chilling intent. But Assu puts a fine point on it, including a turn-of-the-century school desk on a plinth as a stand-in for the culmination of Scott’s destructive policies.

That low rumble, meanwhile, is coming from a darkened portion of the gallery cut off by 2.5-metre walls. You can get close but not in, following a pair of dead-end alleys lined with plywood and tarpaper to convex mirrors showing a snarl of razor wire and projections on the other side. This is the full experience of a collaboration between Anishinabe artist Scott Benesiinaabandan and British-born Theo Sims, but I found myself wishing it wasn’t. The content in the mirrors was barely visible, but not oblique enough to warrant it; and the rough, minimal narrowness of the entry points conveyed a sense of oppression far better all on its own.

As minimal but more plain-spoken were a set of enlarged FBI documents, declassified but redacted, found by Dana Claxton, a Lakota, and surely the best known artist here. Claxton’s most famous works are spare colour photographs that ply Indian stereotypes with a bald-faced kind of absurd glee (in an all-white studio, a war-painted warrior in a baggy business suit next to a vintage red Ford Mustang, part of her 2008 Mustang Suite), but these contain no such manipulated ironies.

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Large swatches of black ink remove salient details pertaining to the surveillance of the leaders of the burgeoning American Indian Movement of the 1970s, but the names of the surveilled are not among them. One page is entirely blacked out, an inadvertent abstraction of a clear violation of constitutional rights.

But back to hope, however tempered. Starting in 2011, Skawennati, a Montreal-based Mohawk artist who works in new media, crafted an online TV series called TimeTraveller using the game engine from Second Life, a popular online virtual reality environment. In it, her central character, a Mohawk warrior named Hunter, gleans lessons about aboriginal experience from early colonialism to the Oka crisis in 1990. Here’s the hopeful part: Hunter, living in 2121, is an empowered, clear-eyed Indian, deepening his own knowledge and experience of his culture. It makes you wish Duncan Campbell Scott had lived to see it.

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